Is Michaela Alive? Or Is She a Victim of the Speed Freak Killers?

Michaela Joy Garecht

She was nine years old when she was abducted on Saturday, November 19th, 1988,  in Hayward, California, San Francisco Bay Area, at the corner of Mission Boulevard and Lafayette Avenue.

It just after 10:00 a.m. on the first day of  Thanksgiving vacation. Michaela and her best friend, Trina, had ridden their scooters two blocks from her Michaela's house to the grocery store then known as Rainbow Market, now called Mexico Super.

When they went in the store, they left their scooters by the front door. 

They started to walk home and when they were halfway across the parking lot they remembered they had brought their scooters and turned back. 

One of the scooters was not where they had left it. 

Michaela spotted it first, a few parking spaces down from the door, next to a parked car. 

She went to get it, and when she bent over to pick it up, a man jumped out of the car, grabbed her from behind, picked her up with his right arm around her waist, and put her into his car as she screamed.

He then took off driving erratically down the busy Mission Boulevard in Hayward.

Trina was the only witness and she ran back into the store to get help.

Michaela's kidnapper was described as a man in his 20's, with long, dirty-blonde hair.

His most outstanding characteristic was severe acne, like boils.

He was wearing a white t-shirt.

He was driving an older, tannish-gold, full-size sedan, boxy in shape, with body damage. 

Trina said,

"He had fox eyes.

He looked right at me, but he didn't even see me."

Wesley Shermantine, one of the Speed Freak Killers duo, wrote a letter to The Stockton Record after his partner in crime, Loren Herzog, committed suicide in January 2012, in which he pointed out that Herzog resembled the composite of the person who kidnapped Michaela.